Researching An Implicit Rule Of US Mainstream Media Coverage

The CNN report on China is a very important part of China mirror image in the mainstream media report. The study of its report rule on China is advantageous for Chinese government to take some positive action to strengthen and improve the report to US, to promote mutual understanding and friendship between China and US.In this study, quantitative and qualitative analyses are employed to investigate the 416 news stories concerning China in 2005, which are supplemented by two case studies: Bird Flu and Mining Accidents. The news stories are analyzed from the perspectives of news attention, themes, orientation, and discourse characteristics.Through the research to CNN report about China in 2005, the article summarizes the CNN implicit rule of China's report. The chain orderly is objective standards, ideology, and national interest. With sticking to western news value, CNN's reporting of China is laden with ideology and driven by the US national interest supreme principle.The first chapter gives general introduction to the theories involved in the study including agenda setting, framing discourse analysis, pseudo environment and gate keeping; the second chapter describes the concrete method of this study; the third chapter researches CNN on the macroscopic plane and carefully analyzes the character of typical China's reports through out the test of analysis method; the fourth chapter summarizes the implicit rule of CNN coverage and the reason; the fifth chapter analyzes two representative cases; the sixth chapter gives some propagandized advice to Chinese government. The author suggests that China should loosen some of constraints imposed on the foreign reports and tell more true stories to the world, so that they could cover China from wider and fairer perspectives.